Initial-stage growth phenomena and distribution of local configurations of the restricted solid-on-solid model

We take a detailed study on the restricted solid-on-solid (RSOS) model with finite nearest-neighbor height difference S. We numerically show that, for all finite values of S, the system belongs to the random-deposition (RD) class in the early time stage and then crossovers to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) class. We find that the crossover time scales as S^ζ with the crossover exponent ζ=2.06. Besides, we analytically study the RSOS model by grouping consecutive sites into local configurations to obtain the Markov chain describing the time evolution of the probability distribution of these local configurations. For demonstration, we use the RSOS model with S=2 as an explicit example and calculate the correlation functions and even scaling exponents based on the obtained probability distribution of local configurations. The results are very consistent with those obtained from direct simulation of the RSOS model.